


Dragon's Daughter

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Female Danny, Gen, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-07-11 16:48:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19931296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Heather and Wendell's firstborn is Danielle Rand. Everything is different, and nothing is.





	Dragon's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirty_diana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirty_diana/gifts).



"I won't .... lose to ... a girl!"

Davos ground this out with his face buried in Dani's armpit, and Dani laughed breathlessly and threw her leg over his, her bare sole pressing into his calf. They were caught up in a tangle of bony limbs, and there was dirt in her teeth and they were both going to be whipped if anyone caught them wrestling in Master Keu's herb garden --

\-- but she _loved_ this, she loved it with the reborn fervor of years spent not loving _anything_ after her parents' plane crashed and took her world away. The strain in her muscles and the sweat soaking her robes and the ache of her bruises was _good_ , because _she_ was good at this; she'd heard Master Lei-Kung saying to Mistress Priya that she had learned the latest forms faster than anyone he'd ever taught, and she was _almost_ as good as Davos now, she just knew it, she was _going_ to beat him this time --

"Yield," she panted, pressing his face down into the sage and rosemary.

"No!" he wheezed out of the corner of his mouth

He bucked his body under her, managing to twist an arm free, and he got his fingers into her hair and yanked on it, pulling a great curly hank out of its clumsily twisted knot at the back of her head. "Ow!" she yelped in shock and pain. Tears sprang to her eyes. Furious, she bore down on his neck, using one of the holds that they weren't supposed to be practicing on other apprentices yet. Davos choked and his face started turning red. Dani dug her knee into his stomach.

"Yield!"

His answer was a wheeze, and then for a startling instant his face wavered in front of her and all she saw was the dead, frozen faces of the pilot and copilot in the snow. Dani let go and tumbled back in horror, and they lay there side by side in the overwhelming fragrance of the crushed herbs, both panting. 

Dani sat up after a minute and tried to hike the skirt of her robe down over her bare, bruised legs. She would be whipped for that as much as for wrestling in the garden, if Davos's mother caught her, because Mistress Priya said she was well and truly old enough to learn to behave with decorum and cover herself properly.

"Davos?" she said hesitantly. He was still making a terrible wheezing sound. "Did I hurt you?"

"You ... yielded," he coughed out, finally.

"I ... what? No, I didn't!"

"You yielded," he said, and the scowl he gave her dared her to disagree. "I won."

"No I didn't, and and you did not!" Dani snapped, and she would have piled back into him right there in the rosemary if there hadn't been an ominous clatter just then of Master Keu's barrow on the path. 

All enmity was forgotten in a look of shared panic, and the two teenagers fled through the hedges into the duckpond next door.

(They were beaten anyway, since of the apprentices, there were only two who were likely to have been wrestling in the herb garden, not to mention the fact that they both still reeked of rosemary as well as duck water.) 

(And Dani eventually stopped wrestling with Davos except as part of regular training exercises, because he wouldn't yield, he never would, and her only choices were to hurt him or to accept a loss by breaking first.)

*

Dani didn't hate being a girl -- it didn't feel _wrong_ to her, at any rate. What she hated was always being aware of it. When she first came to K'un Lun, she was an outsider and she didn't speak any of the languages or know how things were done; the other children her age shunned her because of that. But she could learn. She could catch up. On the training field, all were equal in mastery of the forms.

And then her body betrayed her, swelling and curving. She and Davos had been the same size; now he shot up and was half a head taller. She could still fight, _that_ hadn't changed, but she had all this loose flesh on her chest now, getting in her way. The boys stared at her chest, and made fun of her behind her back, and some of them, like Davos, didn't want to spar with her anymore, while others wanted it a little too much.

She missed her father with a distant ache, but her longing for her mother was crushing and acute, never more so than when she was trying to figure out how to manage menstruation and what to do with all these _breasts._ Priya was probably the closest thing she had to a mother now, she supposed, but Priya was cold and distant, and Dani couldn't imagine how she could go to her for advice. Face flaming, she got up in the middle of the night to scrub out blood-soaked rags in the ice-cold water under the pump in the courtyard. She tried to adapt her fighting form for the longer, wrapped skirts that girls were supposed to wear now that the unisex robes of childhood were no longer good enough.

No one ever told her she was supposed to stop. No one ever said a girl _couldn't_ be the Iron Fist (well, except Davos, and he'd been saying that since they were the same size and her chest was as twiggy as his; it was the kind of thing brothers _said_ ). No one forbade it. Not specifically. But most of the girls attending Master Lei-Kung's lessons seemed to understand it anyway. They began to get engaged, or they went to learn trades instead of martial arts. If they didn't get the idea that they were supposed to lose to the boys, then the boys hassled them until they understood.

The hell with that, Dani thought. She might end up with black eyes and an aching jaw when the boys cornered her behind the water pump, but she wasn't giving up and she wasn't going to lose to a bunch of stupid _boys._

"You're going to get killed, Dani," Davos said, dropping from the roof thatch onto the sun-warmed stone wall behind Lei-Kung and Priya's house, where she sat with her teeth gritted, wrapping bindings around her scraped-up knuckles. He teetered on the wall for an instant before recovering, a bundle of gangly limbs still trying to figure out where all of them went, and it seemed strange to her that they'd once been the same height. He wasn't even _that_ tall, just ... taller than her.

"Well, if I do, it'll save me from having to fight a dragon then," she said sullenly, cradling her aching hand.

"Dani, if you don't stop, they'll do worse than rough you up in the courtyard, don't you understand? They've worked their whole lives for this; they aren't going to let some outsider, and a _girl_ \--"

"They, or you?" she spat at him.

They sat for a little while, legs dangling, as she finished wrapping up her hands and flexed the fingers carefully.

"Mother has been asking me if I intend to continue my training or start thinking about a wife," Davos said at last. He wasn't looking at her, his arms draped over his knees. "I think ... I think they intend you to be my wife."

"I know."

Davos gave her a shocked look. "You know?"

"Like it was that hard to figure out," she scoffed. As if it hadn't hurt like a knife in the guts when she'd heard the other girls talking and figured out _that_ was why Lei-Kung and Priya had taken her into their own home, fed her at their table, treated her like the closest thing she'd had to parents since losing her own.

Davos looked hurt. "Do you not want to?"

"Davos! I don't want to marry anybody! We're way too young to even think about it!"

"Maybe where you come from, but here --"

"Do you?" she asked, and Davos looked down at his hands and didn't say anything.

After a moment, Dani bumped her shoulder against his, then kicked him lightly in the shin with her bare foot, like they were still both ten.

"I'm not going to stop, Davos," she said quietly, and turned around to face him on the wall, tucking up her feet under her skirts. The rock was warm on her bare toes. "It's the only thing I've _got_ , don't you understand that? Unless I want to become some guy's wife and raise a bunch of kids here."

"You could do other things. Yu Yan is apprenticed to the blacksmith now, and she's learning how to fix the equipment on the old mill. And Rushi is going to be a dairy maid and herd cows --"

"Davos, can you _really_ see me hammering parts for water wheels or herding dairy cows?"

"Um ... okay, no, but ..."

"I want to go home," Dani said plaintively. "I want to go to school, and have a condo, and get a degree in ... in ... I don't even know, I don't care, whatever people get degrees in!" What were her parents' degrees in? Business management, maybe? That sounded even more boring than learning to herd dairy cows. "I want to get a driver's license! And get to vote! I want to have a life!"

"You have a life," Davos protested. "And I don't know what ... what most of those other things you said are."

"I know," she said miserably. And that was the whole problem, wasn't it? No one here knew her or understood her. Even Davos, who was the closest friend she had ... even Davos thought she'd be happy being a _dairy maid._ She was just so angry all the time, and everyone told her she had to control it and be calm and smooth and placid, but she was just so _mad_ about it all.

She didn't even really mind being jumped by bullies in the courtyard. It gave her someone to fight.

"Dani, listen." Davos turned around on the wall, facing her as well, with his legs folded under him. "When I'm the Iron Fist, I'll find a way for you to go home, okay? I promise I will. I won't stop searching until I do."

He was so earnest and honest. And he didn't understand. Dani scrubbed at her eyes angrily.

"I'm not going to give up," she said in a small voice. 

Davos sighed. "I figured you'd say that. You're not going to win either ... you know that, right?"

Dani just shook her head.

"Yeah. You know, you're bleeding again."

Dani looked down at the dark stains on the bandages. "It'll stop eventually," she said, flexing her hand.

"I know, but ... listen, come in and let Father put some ointment on it, all right? So it doesn't heal badly."

When they were little kids, back when there had been no difference between them, she and Davos had both been constant masses of scraped knees and split knuckles and bruised elbows. All she could do was smile bitterly.

"Would you even ask me that if I wasn't a girl?"

Davos pulled his hand back, looking hurt and angry again. "Suit yourself," he said, and jumped down from the wall, striding off toward the courtyard.

Dani sat on the wall for a long while, fists clenched. Then she jumped down and went back to practice on the training dummies some more. Who cared if her hands split and bled. She was going to show Davos, and Lei-Kung, and Priya. She was going to show them _all._

*

Years later, when the fire flowed through her, when she could ball up her hands into fists and finally let all that anger out and channel it straight through a stone wall, it was the best thing she'd ever felt.

And also the most terrifying. 

There was a proverb Lei-Kung used to quote about wanting something only until you had it. She loved the dragon's fire, craved it, and feared it, but she didn't regret it.


End file.
